Can Mouth Tape Actually Make You Sleep Better?
Hey, remember a few months ago? This past March, perhaps, when we were young? I don’t either, but apparently in this calendar year, the world was momentarily delighted by a social media video depicting the morning routine of fitness influencer Ashton Hall. Hall’s daily practice included a 3:55am wake-up, regular face baths in bottled water, and a physics-defying elevator ride up from his apartment to the gym, then another elevator ride back to his apartment, somehow also up.
In this video, Hall set the "healthy" habits bar higher than the Blue Origin rocket ride—which I swear also happened this year. The similarities between Hall’s day and mine begin and end with “banana,” although I eat mine, and he applies his topically, so even that’s not the same. But there was one of Hall's healthy hacks that seemed within a mortal’s grasp: going to bed with a big piece of tape over the mouth. I don’t have the bottled water budget for three daily Saratoga face plunges, but taping my own mouth shut? That I can do.
It’s just…why, though?
Put simply, blocking the mouth forces you to breathe through your nose.“It's honestly super grounded in science,” says Todd Anderson, co-founder of a sleep-optimization company called Dream Performance & Recovery. “Nasal breathing is by far the most efficient, healthiest way to breathe.” The nose has natural air filters, for one thing. For another, sleeping with your mouth open dries it out, which leads to inflammation of the gums and the accumulation of bad breath-causing bacteria. But most critically, breathing through your little nostrils instead of your big dumb yap tricks your body into longer, slower breaths, which naturally relax the central nervous system. “When you put the tape on, you're backing yourself into a meditative state,” Anderson says. “It's a way to get the outcomes of a breathwork session without having to actually commit yourself to it.” Of course, it should be said, that you need to make sure you don't have a chronic condition like sleep apnea before you start trying to trick your body into different breathing patterns.
If you clear that hurdle, dream makes a couple of different kinds of mouth tape: Dream Tape, made of bamboo silk and 5 percent spandex, and Dream Tape+, a nylon and spandex blend infused with vitamins, collagen, coQ10, aloe vera. Both are 2” x 1” strips, you pull at the edges to reveal the adhesive, you press it on your mouth, and boom: you’re sleep-maxxing.
I reached for the Dream Tape+ first, because I’m worth it. And I’m here to tell you: in the first week, I only woke up scared and ripped it off my face at 3am once or twice... There is a tiny adjustment period to sleeping with your mouth taped shut, as of course there would be. I have to imagine my body spent a moment wondering whether I’d been taken hostage.
Once I got used to it, the benefits became shockingly clear. After only a week, my Apple Watch told me my average "awake time" in a night’s sleep went from 40ish minutes down to 10. Wearables, like an Apple Watch, measure awake time with a combination of the accelerometer (movement sensor) and heart-rate monitor. It's a measure of your tossing and turning. All I know is I woke up feeling calm, refreshed, and free of cottonmouth after only a few nights.
Another purported benefit of mouth taping, which I have yet to see and am generally skeptical on, is purely cosmetic. “Your bone structure tends to take the shape of the position you’re in for the sleeping hours,” Anderson says. “When you’re a mouth-breather, you tend to get a less-defined chin, just because that’s the position your face is in for so long.” Nasal breathing, when done properly, forces your lower jaw slightly forward, so the thinking is that over time, you can find yourself with a stronger jawline. Will I have a jaw like a Hemsworth brother by end of summer? I can only hope.
My only real problem was this: I’ve been growing my beard out, and I found that the longer my stubble got, the less well the Dream Tape+ stayed on. The Dream team tells me that's due to the aloe vera in this model; it makes it less adhesive to facial hair. Beardy boys take note.
To round out its sleep optimization product line, Dream also sent over a PERFORMANCE Sleep Mask, and a PERFORMANCE Silk Pillowcase. Honestly, a sleep mask and silk bedding have always felt very Blanche Deveraux to me, so it’s good the word PERFORMANCE is there to remind me that this is dude shit. The second they come out with STRENGTH hair-curlers and an EFFICIENCY bonnet, count me in.
Dream also just put out Second Wind Nasal Strips, which attach over the bridge of the nose, affix over the nostrils, and open that nose up. Like the Breathe Right strips you’d get at the drugstore, but PERFORMANCE. “When you breathe through your nose throughout the night, you have less disruptive breath,” Anderson says, “which means less snoring.” Between the tape and the strips, my partner, who I will confidentially reveal is a snorer, has not made a peep. This is huge.
One other thing we both noticed was that when we started taping, we also started having some fuuuuucked up dreams. Initially concerning, but Anderson says this is because we're getting more REM sleep, a good sign. His story checks out: according to my Whoop fitness tracker— because I am also wearing one of those—I got 25 percent more REM and deep sleep in the last month than in the months before I started masking, taping, and nasal stripping. So based on my health tracking and how I feel, I am getting real benefits just from shutting my unconscious yap.
That means I’m a mouth taper now. My sleep is more refreshing, I wake up calmer, and I am no longer in bed next to a wood chipper. I can’t say that I have had zero 3am worry sessions, because there is a lot to spin out about in this moment. But I can say for sure that I have had fewer, and my dueling fitness trackers back me up with data. I do not yet have the jaw of a Seth MacFarlane cartoon of a handsome guy, but it’s still early days. I’m a believer. I’m a “throw a few mouth tape strips in my backpack so I can sleep when I’m traveling” guy. I’m a sleep-maxxer, and I have to say, I love it.
esquire
